The cable network is aimed to have a capacity of up to 190 Tbps in the Asia-Pacific regions.
Facebook and Google will collaborate to construct an undersea cable system that will connect Taiwan, Japan, The Philippines, Singapore, Guam, and Indonesia and is expected to be completed in 2024. To accommodate growing data needs in the region, the cable network is projected to have an initial design capacity of over 190 Tbps. To transport telecommunication signals, sea cables are installed on sea floors. They are composed of hundreds of optical fibers that carry data between two destinations.
It is not the first time that Google and Facebook have collaborated to construct undersea internet connections. Both companies have previously deployed thousands of kilometers of undersea internet cable and are in the course of laying thousands more. In March 2021, both the tech companies announced the launch of two new undersea cables, Bifrost and Echo, to connect Southeast Asian nations such as Singapore and Indonesia to North America through Guam.
According to Bilash Koley, VP, Google Cloud for Telecommunications, the new project, named Apricot, will complement Bifrost and Echo by providing various ways to and from Asia. Apricot will collaborate with Echo to build a massive pipeline that will connect California to the Japanese mainland. The cables will ensure a good level of resilience for digital services of google as well as of google cloud.
In response to political pressure from the U.S. government, which claimed security concerns, Google and Facebook both canceled plenty of projects connecting the U.S. and Hong Kong between 2020 and early 2021.
Apricot will also be added to Google's worldwide list of subsea cables, which includes Dunant, Equiano, Grace Hopper, and Curie, increasing the company's global investment in 18 subsea cables spanning 27 cloud regions and 82 zones.